It was negative forty-five degrees Fahrenheit at the South Pole on the morning of November 4th, 2023, when I departed Williams Field, a runway of compacted snow sitting on around ten feet of sea ice. I was one of fourteen passengers on a Basler propeller ski-plane, one of the few aircraft that can safely land and take off in the extreme temperatures typical of the beginning of the austral summer.
I was seated next to a meteorologist who had been to the Pole—most people called it Pole, without the article—and back many times. We were crammed into tiny seats, both bundled in the mandatory full kit of extreme-cold-weather gear, and, as we flew, he told me about the geographical features below. Excited as I was, I found myself distracted by the thought of the fragile cookie cutters and baker’s scale I’d stowed in my duffel, now buried beneath a pile of deep-field survival bags, which are required on Antarctic flights, like life rafts on boats. Between the required earplugs and the deafening roar of the engine, talk was limited. I heard enough to know what I was seeing.
I stared down, the jagged contours of the Transantarctic Mountains beneath me, the soot-black rock peeking out from immense snowdrifts. Just over a sharp ridge that the belly of the plane seemed to graze, the vast expanse of the Beardmore Glacier spread before us. I’d been reading about this legendarily cruel stretch of ice since grade school, when my father handed me a copy of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s “The Worst Journey in the World.” As Cherry-Garrard’s party approached “the great tumbled glacier” in December, 1911, he wrote, “we gathered that the Beardmore was a very bad glacier indeed.” And so it proved to be, pushing the explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his men to the limit, before the Ross Ice Shelf finally broke them.
Having reread Cherry-Garrard’s book along with the rest of the literature of Antarctic exploration, mostly books that detail Scott’s and Ernest Shackleton’s adventures, I experienced the frozen landscape like a place I’d been, the landmarks of the enormous continent as real as my distant childhood. I never thought I could go there. When I stumbled upon a job that fit my skills as a semi-professional baker, the long-imagined place materialized.
However bookish my ideal of it, going to Antarctica aligned with my idea of myself as tough, independent, and not old. I’m attracted to solo adventures that frighten me a little—backpacking, holing up in an isolated cabin to write, walking across France. Still, abandoning my life in New York City and committing to the incalculable unknowns of being the resident baker at the South Pole was immoderate, even for me. There was no talking me out of it. As Mary Shelley’s narrator Victor Frankenstein put it, though “I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation, it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight.”
And then, out the window, there it was—the modular structure where I’d be living, perched on stilts atop the glacier like a water bug on a frozen pond. The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, completed in 2008, is the third station built by the U.S. government at the geographic South Pole. The first, from 1956, was buried under the ever-accumulating ice, and the second, from 1975, was preëmptively dismantled to avoid a similar fate. In keeping with the structure’s stated mission, it is administered by the National Science Foundation. The building’s shiny, dark metal sheathing might have appeared sinister in any other environment, but not here, set against the sparkling white. I climbed down the narrow airplane stairs in my oversized boots, then emerged onto the wide-open landscape, where I stood awed by the pristine expanse meeting the curve of the horizon in every direction.
Antarctica, the coldest, emptiest, highest, windiest continent on earth, is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. At roughly nine thousand three hundred feet above sea level, the thin subzero air assaulted my lungs immediately, and the reflective background and uninterrupted nothingness attracted my focus to hints of pastel colors.
I’d arrived early in the summer season. The landscape beyond the station remained unmarked by man. No roads, no buildings, no power lines, no footprints. It’s exactly what Scott and his men saw when they arrived on January 17, 1912, hoping to claim the Pole but instead finding a dark flag stuck in the ice, left there by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, with an attached note claiming the glory of “first.” I wished that I could see the very spot, but the ice shifts roughly sixty metres a year. It’s now lost, buried some four miles away.
Arrival was a shock. Inside the station, I unzipped my engorged duffel, retrieving my precious scale and cookie cutters. I filled my drawers, tacked up photos of my husband, two children, and dog, and pulled out the recipe book I’d assembled—marzipan cake, ginger-prune upside-down cake, walnut tart. My father was a chef, and I grew up in a rarefied food world. I’m as obsessed with ingredients as I am with the subtleties of flavor and texture. Taste is a form of knowledge that’s nearly impossible to unlearn, and, whatever challenges the job might pose, I hadn’t planned to try. I’d witnessed the baked goods served at McMurdo, the main American station in Antarctica, where I’d had to wait three weeks before being flown to the Pole proper: dense chocolate-chip scones, confetti cake from a mix, Jell-O. These sorts of undoubtedly popular items aren’t in my repertoire, but neither, honestly, was the daily bread I was now responsible for producing, in addition to a morning pastry, a lunch cookie, and an evening dessert.
I had a day off to adjust to the altitude before my first shift. I felt fine, maybe because I was born at eight thousand feet above sea level in Aspen, Colorado, where my father opened his first restaurant, or maybe because we’d all been offered the high-altitude medication Diamox before departure. Either way, I was practically levitating with excitement. Most rooms at the Pole are singles. They’re pretty much identical—large enough to hold a bed, a bureau, and a desk. I’m six feet tall, and the tiny quarters made for a snug fit. But, after three weeks of sharing a windowless room with four other people at McMurdo, the austere space might as well have been the Carlyle. What surprised me most was how ordinary the station was—grubby lounges with the feel of college dorms, a media room stuffed with DVDs and a dejected couch, a craft room with deranged projects scattered about, a laundry room, a sauna, and a store where I could buy stamps, T-shirts with the United States Antarctic Program logo, toothpaste, and stale candy.
The next day, I began the six-day-week, eleven-hour-day, thirteen-dollars-an-hour existence that would nearly defeat me in the course of three months. (Room, board, and transport from the U.S. were included.) Although the initial population at the station was sixty or so, it soon ballooned to a fairly steady hundred and fifty, a lopsided mix of scientists (maybe fifteen per cent) and support staff known as “ops,” as in “operations” (everyone else). I worked under the blazing midnight sun from 6 P.M. to 5 A.M., the “mid-rat” shift. “Mid-rat” is short for “midnight-ration”—Navy language inherited by the U.S.A.P. “Ration,” not meal; “galley,” not kitchen; “berth,” not room.
The weary overwinter baker whom I was relieving departed on day three, and from then on, for that first austral summer—November through early February—I was alone every night, the butter thumping against the wall of the bowl in the massive Hobart mixer while I stared out at the flags marking each signatory to the Antarctic Treaty as they bucked in the wind. Headphones in, chef’s jacket on a hook as I peeled down to a tank top, beanie covering my gray-streaked hair, I poked at focaccia, balled cookie dough, frosted cakes, carved up brownies, and cut lemon squares against the background rabble of the tipsy, Catan-obsessed scientists who liked to hang out in the dining room abutting the kitchen.
Sometimes I took long walks on the plateau with a station friend, a carpenter. One night, short on time and exhausted from a twelve-mile walk in the mild fifteen-below air, I pawed through the pantry for something easy to bake, cringing at the boxes of Duncan Hines Devil’s Food Cake Mix and generic no-bake cheesecake. Thinking that I might risk cheating my way into a cherry pie, I picked up a box of Gold Medal Deluxe Instant Pie Crust. As I pulled it off the shelf, the lettering on the flap caught my eye: BEST IF USED BY 14APR01. I was holding pre-9/11 pie-crust mix?
I learned to joke about the canned cherries from the Carter Administration, but more often I told people that my ingredients were from the Obama Administration—which was closer to the truth. I had no choice but to use cartons of expired frozen-egg product and petroleum-scented flour (it, like the ice cream, was stored next to the fuel drums) and, eventually, even the decades-old cherries, but I drew the line at eating Obama-era chicken. Actually, I didn’t eat much of anything. Mostly, I survived on ramen that I discovered, along with other snack foods—sleeves of Oreos, Chips Ahoy, Nature Valley granola bars—in a cabinet under the steam table. My monkey suit (black chef’s pants and a white chef’s coat) grew looser by the day.
Everyone on station was used to the antique ingredients, just as they were used to scooping ice cream out of the core of three-gallon tubs. I often thought of Cherry-Garrard eating porridge and fried seal liver for breakfast and tried to lighten up on the Bush-era butter. The supplies were stored in a vast warehouse behind the station, where the temperature stayed at minus seventy degrees. That’s cold enough to halt the steady bacterial breakdown that occurs in a regular freezer kept at, say, zero degrees Fahrenheit, but not cold enough to suppress my anguish at the prospect of eating a chicken that stopped clucking in 2011.
When I finished my shifts, I’d take a precious one-minute shower to rinse off the kitchen stink. A daily shower was a luxury I was allowed as a galley worker. Everyone else, with the exception of the “fuelies,” was limited to a pair of two-minute showers per week. This included the scientists, who tended to think that they were a notch above the rest of us. Back in my berth, I’d secure a cardboard cutout that blocked the blinding sunlight from flooding the room twenty-four hours a day. On my door, I’d taped a Matthias Haker postcard of Manhattan that my best friend gave me next to a laminated poster of an owl saying, “Shhhhh. Day Sleeper.” I’d give my family photos one last look, wish my kids and husband good night from the bottom of the world, and turn off the light.
Most days, I woke up around 2:30 P.M. I’d throw on sweatpants and a T-shirt, make my way through the idle firemen who played pool at all hours in B-Lounge, and head down the long hall to the galley, where I’d gobble a bowl of ramen with some frozen spinach. Then I’d go back to my berth to really dress: long underwear, down pants, two pairs of socks, wool undershirt, sweater, down mittens, balaclava, beanie, and Big Red. That’s what everyone called the bright-red Canada Goose down parka that, along with insulated white “bunny boots” and a whole lot of other not-so-nice cold-weather gear, is issued to each worker in Christchurch, New Zealand, before departing for “the ice.” It pleased me to see my name sewn into the back of Big Red, although I winced to think what the thrifty Amundsen, in his reindeer-hide boots, wolf-fur-trimmed anorak, and sealskin suit would think of my flashy gear.
Just down the corridor from my room, the door opened to a view of the scattered sheds that gave this side of the station a feeling of sprawl. It’s nothing like the scar on the continent that is McMurdo, but with the booze shack, hazardous-waste storage, weather-balloon-and-meteorology headquarters, ski-equipment storage, and gym, to name a few, the area wasn’t exactly tidy. I paused to watch a bulldozer pushing snow away from the building, emitting billowing clouds of exhaust into some of the cleanest air on earth.
The messy scene was easy to escape by heading toward the gigantic South Pole Telescope, which is used to study black holes, among other things, or the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, where the equipment is designed to detect the passage of neutrinos through dark ice, or the Atmospheric Research Observatory building, filled with devices that monitor and record air pressure, temperature, and quality. I liked the faded-blue A.R.O. building best, as it’s partially entombed by ice crystals that accumulate at a rate of approximately eight inches a year—whether blown across the ice, or formed directly on the building. This “snow” never, ever melts.
I adore the cold, and, bundled in Big Red, I was practically hot—except for my face. The wind pelted my exposed cheeks and nose, the pain dangerously dull. If I didn’t protect my skin, even at the beginning of Polar summer, it’d be hard to the touch by the time I went back inside, the delicate cells frozen. So I’d pull Big Red’s hood up. The fur-lined funnel protected my face but trapped the moisture in my breath, causing fine crystals to glitter on my upper lip, nose, and eyelashes. A film of ice coated my glasses, softening the lines of the landscape. Cherry-Garrard’s glasses, too, caused him no end of trouble.
I wasn’t out long at that time of day—just long enough to walk beyond the station and take in the stark beauty that got me through my shift. My sneakers would crunch and squeak, and I’d eventually plop down and lean against a hard ridge of snow. Ice crystals skittered across the plateau, catching in the curve of the sastrugi before blowing free. As Birdie Bowers, a member of Scott’s final expedition, observed, the surface appeared as an expanse of “blue rippled ice with sharp knife edges,” as if a stormy sea were flash-frozen. I’d stare into the distance, as solitary as can be. I couldn’t get enough of the geometry of the surface’s eggshell-white ridges, severe in the flat light, communicating cold.
Soon, I was back in the galley, ready for my shift. It was dinnertime for the rest of the station. I’d sit sipping instant cocoa, watching the mocha cake or Key-lime pie or tiramisu I made the night before disappearing, bit by bit. The meteorologist from my inbound flight might stop by to say hello. The electronic noticeboard in the dining room showed the flight schedule for the next LC-130 Hercules (“the Herc”) arriving from McMurdo. I’d ask the meteorologist whether he thought the plane would make it in, and, more often than not, he’d shake his head. For months, there was no heavy cream and no fresh eggs on station, never mind an apple or a head of lettuce. “Weather delay” or “mechanical delay” on the board meant no “freshies”—what everyone called fresh fruit, vegetables, and dairy—for me to cook with.
My boss, after finishing his long day shift, often sat down for a quick chat. He called me “chef,” which made me blush. With the exception of the dinner cook, whom it took me months to win over, I almost never saw my co-workers. I didn’t mind. The two lunch “boys” were young and disconcertingly confident, given the sparseness of their collective kitchen knowledge. Once a week, my boss would ask whether he could have my booze ration. I wasn’t drinking while I was on the ice. I nodded yes and smiled, warning him, “Take it easy, boss.” Alcohol had to be bought, but there was a weekly limit: either a bottle of hard liquor, three bottles of wine, or a whole lot of weak beer. Empty Jameson bottles and Pabst Blue Ribbon cans rattled around the lounges.
On my day off, I’d sit and eat dinner with a friend and then, once the station quieted, read and write in the sunlight streaming into the dining area. Internet at the station came primarily from NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite, whose orbit passes within range of the Pole for three and a half hours a day. If it happened to be up, I might send e-mails, but I wouldn’t read the news or watch a movie. I’d sworn off those diversions for the duration of my stay. Disconnecting from the world felt true to the early explorers, who had nothing to divert them but their books and journals.
Soon, I’d be at my mixer again, yeast bubbling to life in warm water, recipe book open. My co-worker on the dinner shift closed the line, packaged and labelled leftovers for the community refrigerator, prepared the mop bucket. One day, I started on my to-do list: blueberry muffins for breakfast, fennel-raisin semolina cookies for lunch, cornbread and banana cake for dinner. Southern food was on the next day’s dinner menu. I did what I could to match up my bread and dessert.
With my apron on, and with ten pounds of butter and two quarts of egg product on the counter to temper, I stepped out the big door onto the outdoor landing—an alfresco freezer—to retrieve several pounds of frozen blueberries. After I’d dusted two inches of ice crystals from the cardboard box of fruit, my bare hands began to register that it was thirty below. What would the men who spent the night not five miles from here, a hundred and eleven years ago, have given for a handful of these berries? Starved and dying of scurvy, their teeth coming out, their limbs failing, they slogged northward until they could go no farther.
Piled on the landing’s shelves were frozen meat patties, vegetables, fruit, and more potato products than I could count. The space was nothing more than a metal platform at the top of a tall exterior staircase. Whenever I got tired of the job or discouraged by a cake collapsing or bread dough rising too fast, I’d step into the cold for a dose of the blue-white I came all this way for. I called it the Most Beautiful Freezer in the World.
The view from the freezer did me good, every time. As Christmas approached, I was growing brittle. I’d mastered the bread that had worried me at the beginning—most days my loaves came out of the oven brown, if not always crusty. I pushed myself to please without compromising, even as my boss encouraged me to serve instant pudding. Overhearing strangers confess how many of my cookies they’d eaten at lunch kept me vigilant.
I’d started getting inconveniently teary—frequently stepping out for a cry in the Most Beautiful Freezer in the World. Christmas at the Pole required a grand feast, no small part of which consisted of the desserts, candies, and breads that I was responsible for. Maybe it was the holiday pressure, or maybe it was the weeks of solitary nights in the kitchen. But when I sat down before my shift one night with a mechanic friend, her pink beanie smeared with grease, her innocent question broke me. “How are you?” can be dangerous. My throat tightened. I wiped at my face, trying to make the tears disappear. As I caught my breath, I gulped that I’d exhausted myself and missed my family. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve cried in front of everyone on station.” We were all stuck there, holding out as best we could; like family members, we eventually figured out how to be lonely together.
A fake tree the firemen put up in the mess hall made me miss the scent of pine. I fiddled with decorating eighty penguin cookies. I thought of Scott and his men struggling south across the Beardmore, hauling their heavy sleds loaded with food, fuel, and gear. As I rolled hundreds of truffles in cocoa powder, the “great feed” that Scott’s men enjoyed on Christmas Day, 1911, came to mind. In canvas tents, they marked the day with “a good fat hoosh with pony meat and ground biscuit; a chocolate hoosh made of chocolate, cocoa, sugar, biscuit, raisins and thickened with a spoonful of arrowroot.” Before wriggling into their stiff sealskin sleeping bags, they consumed “2 ½ square inches of plum-duff each, and a good mug of cocoa.”
On Christmas Day, I left the kitchen midmorning for a few hours’ sleep and returned in the afternoon to bake the final items, and to decorate, label, and platter my contributions to the big feed. When I finished, I sat down, inhaling the earthy holiday smell—a mix of stuffing, cheap red wine, and bodies perspiring in the unusual warmth of the room. Every so often, I got up to replace a cake or deliver a fresh plate of cookies. I wanted to be certain that the rosy-cheeked mechanics and heavy-equipment operators, nearly unrecognizable without their insulated, chocolate-brown Carhartt overalls, weren’t deprived of any pleasure. At the end of the galley, the strangers I’d slowly come to know gripped blue plastic trays as they moved down the length of the steam table, heaping duck, potatoes, gravy, roast beef, and peas onto their plates. I watched them collect pats of shiny foil-wrapped butter to smear on the pillowy white rolls I’d made. I hoped that they’d like them, and that I’d made enough for everyone. ♦
